Wondering why your property tax bill is late?

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If you're like the Watchdog, your property tax bill arrived in the mail just this past weekend.

Not that we were eagerly awaiting it. We tossed the envelope, unopened, on a pile of other bills and tried to direct our thoughts to more pleasant things.

Then a reader reminded us that the nominal due date for the first tax payment was Thursday, Nov. 1 – i.e. yesterday – and we thought, “that's slicing it pretty fine (although as any competent procrastinator or cash manager knows, the real deadline for the first installment is Dec. 10, after which late penalties begin to accrue).” Yes, we think like that.

Turns out we weren't the only ones thinking that way. County Supervisor Bill Campbell said his office and those of other supervisors have been getting calls asking why the bills are late.

Jennifer Burkhart, assistant treasurer-tax collector, was summoned to Tuesday's Board of Supervisors meeting to give an answer. She said bills went in the mail starting Oct. 18, about 10 days later than last year.

The treasurer-tax collector's office gets the tax roll from the auditor-controller, which gets it from the assessor. Assessor Webster Guillory implemented a new, $28 million software system this year and additional time was taken to double-check the calculations, resulting in later-than-usual delivery to the auditor-controller, which then did its own extra quality-control checks.

The treasurer-tax collector didn't get the roll until Oct. 12, Burkhart said.

What needs to happen to get the bills out sooner next year, Campbell wanted to know. “Getting it to us earlier would be the only solution,” Burkhart said.

Treasurer-Tax Collector Shari Freidenrich (who was out of town Tuesday and thus wasn't at the supervisors' meeting) wrote in an email Wednesday that it takes about two weeks to mail the more than 850,000 tax bills.

“I am hoping that next year, we will be back to mailing the tax bills in late September or early October,” Freidenrich wrote.

That may not be in the tea leaves.

The treasurer-tax collector and the auditor-controller are supposed to switch to their own new, over-budget, behind-schedule property-tax software system sometime in the next couple of years.

Mahesh Patel, the county's head of information technology, told the supervisors Tuesday that the property-tax management system, or PTMS, currently budgeted at $24.3 million, has a “go live” target of January 2014. However, the main vendor on the project, TCS, has been struggling to meet deadlines and wants more money to get the job done, Patel said.

In an interview Wednesday, Patel said the county's staff bears some of the responsibility for the 18-month delay in the planned “go live” of PTMS, as well as the $4 million-plus increase in cost so far. The county prepared a 6,000-page needs assessment, for example, but even at that length, it wasn't specific enough to enable TCS to get the job done, and therefore change orders – i.e. more money – were required, he said.

By law, the assessor's systems must be separate from the tax collector's, Guillory said. Therefore, an interface is being developed to enable the two new systems to communicate.

Which got John Moorlach to wondering: If ACS, the vendor on the assessor tax system (ATS), is now finished with that project, and TCS is missing deadlines on PTMS, is that more acronyms than any non-bureaucrat should have to contemplate?

Just kidding. What Moorlach, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, really wondered is whether ACS, which presumably now has droves of ATS-experienced programmers sitting idle, might be brought in to help TCS get PTMS – and particularly the interface – done faster. Patel said he'd give ACS a jingle to ask.

Meanwhile, ACS, which is owned by Xerox, is in line to begin negotiations on a big chunk of the county's roughly $200 million, multi-year, overarching information technology services contract, provided the supervisors give their blessing. They're scheduled to consider doing so Nov. 13.

ACS was the vendor on the expiring IT contract, which ran more than 10 years. The new one will likely be shorter, in keeping with industry trends, Patel said.

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